


bind up all our scattered leaves

by Anonymous



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Other, Worldbuilding, introspective, sturm und drang, the Force POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-06 08:35:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14053071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: All creatures are hers, for she is life, and all creatures remain hers forever, for she is death.





	bind up all our scattered leaves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reeby10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reeby10/gifts).



> I was really excited by the Force worldbuilding tags in your sign-up. I also took inspiration from your Maythe4th letter because I could see places where the ideas overlapped. I hope you enjoy!

She doesn’t love.

She _cannot_ love — all creatures are hers, every life a droplet of perfect wonder in the endless sea of her existence — but sometimes she has a special favorite, a sweet child with hair the color of the desert and eyes the color of an ocean he will never stop being awed by, or the tempestuous man he begets and becomes and begets again.

Sometimes, her favored children move worlds, and sometimes they burn out like embers in the night, but they are always, always beautiful.

She breathes with him, with _them_ ; for there are many.

( _Always two there are_ , someone had said once or maybe a hundred times, and she folds the words into her belly and cradles another of her favorites to the depths of her so he can see her breadth and power all at once. He spends eternities wondering, wandering, and she delights in his delight. He reaches and she reaches and she can feel his touch and sometimes, she wonders herself.)

He is sparks and passion and pain that makes her _understand_ , and she breathes with him. Through him. Seeing life through her favored children’s eyes is a sweetness that she can’t resist.

***

He is barely walking the first time he reaches for her, and she is startled for a moment — every little spark, every new being who has touched her for so long has been nothing but the sugar-lightness of gossamer beauty, but he is something else, something richer and deeper and cooler, and she responds to him eagerly.

He has fallen and cannot reach anything to clamber back to his feet, so instead he _reaches_ and finds _her_ and bounds abruptly upright giggling with triumph found.

Elsewhere, another of her special children sits up and takes notice of this new eddy in the depths of her, the shift like warm blood in the water to her cold child, and she whispers to him how to reach this new one, and the cold one _listens._

***

Older, he holds her in his mind like a dichotomy of purpose, and she would be amused at the fact that he has rediscovered her in ways done a million times before, on worlds he has never seen by beings he has never known, except that he clings to both ideals at once.

He holds her close to his heart, and to him she is the gentle flow of waves on his homeworld, a planet that has held as many names as creatures have dwelt upon it, and she is a supernova, exploding at the edges of galaxies, destroying everything in incandescent fury.

He loves her, and she cannot help how closely she holds him.

The cold one reaches, and she whispers to him visions of _soon_ and _you will not love him enough._

Her special ones, no matter how favored in her power they are, only ever listen to the things they wish to know, however, and he is too cold to care.

***

_Betrayal_.

It licks through her, and she can feel the way everyone who has ever touched her reacts with it, tragedy and triumph at every angle, and suddenly those who have come before feed into it or draw away from it, and her entire existence is chaos and glorious, glorious life.

Her favored son brings with him death, and she can feel the tears on his cheeks like raindrops in a hurricane, and she can feel the deaths of dozens, and the cold one reaches through her and shows her boy how to channel her, how to hold her in the palm of his hand and how to release her, and she rocks with the changes.

Some live. Most die.

She allows them to see her for what she truly is as they live and die, and they reward her with emotions she has felt untold times, and she shows them that she will favor them forever.

The cold one comes and collects _her_ boy and she watches them. Her boy cradles her closer than any lover, and the cold one holds her at a distance, as wary as he is awed, and she knows her boy will show the cold one the truth of her one day, just as someone will one day show him.

Most die.

***

There are others. There are always others. Some are the slow seep of a dry creekbed in drought, and some are a wildfire raging through a forest that brims with life.

Some are soft and some are hard and all are brilliant fiery life.

Some are a sandstorm on a desert, unexpected, fierce, beautiful.

She could warn him, she thinks, visions of how this will end, because his hurricane is fierce as it is shortlived; but she won’t.

Sandstorms fade away just as fast, and the way they interact thrills her to her core, and when they fight, a thousand systems are born, and a thousand systems die.

The cold one doesn’t like her sandstorm child, but the cold one hardly matters. He has never liked her; he does not listen as he should. 

They almost never do.

It does not matter. Life without death is not life at all — she knows this as intimately as she knows all.

The sandstorm girl shows her favored boy pain and more pain, and it blossoms up through his connection to her, driving him close enough to her bosom that she can taste his fury, his desperation, his dying breath.

 _”Not yet,”_ she whispers.

He startles awake in the arms of any one of an interchangeable bevy of life forms that are grotesquely similar in her vision, and he screams.

***

His father doesn’t know; his father will never understand.

The father had been there at the first, when their boy, _her_ boy, had been small and sobbing helplessly because he could not find a way to stand in the middle of an empty room; when he had been suddenly smiling and on his feet; the father had never been more scared.

Their boy sent away, _her_ boy who kills an entire cadre of the bright sparks of her favored ones, sending them into the heart of her, making the father scream fury and rage into the vast emptiness of space. 

A father who will take his own heart from her other children, splitting the entwined lives of so many favored sparks asunder.

A father who doesn’t understand, not even to the last.

“Help me,” their boy whispers, and she echoes his wishes, his pain, his desire, his fury. The father is not the constant lapping tide on an old planet that has known many names, and the father is not the fury of a supernova on the edge of a galaxy.

The father is a man who has never understood.

She takes pity when he dies, shows him the truth meant only for her favored ones. 

There is no apology in this, only understanding. 

There is life, and there is death. There are her special favored ones like droplets of water gleaming in the light of a distant star, and there is the rest of eternity, teeming with things he cannot imagine.

There is knowledge, now, for him: she has _always_ cherished their boy more.

***

None of them can understand, she knows, for she does not love.

Every living being can love a sandstorm or a hurricane or the endlessness of an ocean only dreamt of, but those things cannot love back.

All creatures are hers, for she is life, and all creatures remain hers forever, for she is death.

Every so often, however, a creature is begotten who understands both sides of her and holds as much in his heart as she does, and she breathes with him and more than breathes; she holds him closer than any others and helps him and protects him, and perhaps that is love after all.


End file.
